I came across this in my travels tonight, and thought it might make for an eye-brow raiser...

The long and short of it - some researchers decided to reverse apply Moore's Law to human biology. Using their Moore's Law-based computations, they first applied it to modern computers, and came up with the right answer - that microchips showed up right around the 1960's.

They then took the same computations and applied it to biological complexity (which, of course, humans are the pinnacle of as we know it). The results suggest that life began 5 billion years before the Earth even existed...

What it really means, who knows... The researchers who ran the computations refused to call it a theory and instead label it a "thought excersize" (the cowards!). In any case, it's pretty damned interesting.

The Catholic Church does get a bad rap for it's suppression of science. It's not nonexistent, but overstated. Even Galileo likely could have caught less friction if he didn't go out of his way to be a huge asshole about things.